Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (The Washington Post / The Washington Post/Getty Images)
The LA Times
As one might expect, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had no difficulty putting her finger on the point of Texas' voter ID law: it's openly racist.
Ginsburg's colleagues voted 6-3 to allow the Texas law to remain in effect for the upcoming election. But as she observed in a scathing dissent issued Saturday, the measure may prevent more than 600,000 registered voters, or 4.5% of the total, from voting in person for lack of accepted identification. "A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African-American or Hispanic," she wrote.
The law's intent is "purposely discriminatory," Ginsburg concluded. Citing the U.S. District Court ruling that declared the Texas law unconstitutional, she observed that since 2000, Texas has become a majority-minority state. That gave its Legislature and governor "an evident motive to 'gain partisan advantage by suppressing'" the votes of blacks and Latinos.
Is there any better testament to the bankruptcy of Republican political ideas than the party's consistent effort to win elections by limiting the vote?
